Professorial Capital: Blue-Collar Reflections on Class, Culture, and the Academy

Abstract

Merging theory with autoethnographic reflections, the author critically explores the relationship between social class and the reproduction of inequality within the upper ranks of the academy, while reflexively and purposefully challenging traditional modes of academic discourse. Drawing from the author's experiences as a blue-collar sociology doctoral student, the concept of an academic class ceiling is elaborated. In an attempt to link everyday practices within a larger structural framework, the author advances a theory of professorial capital derived from Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. This article argues that unless the everyday dynamics of class exclusion are explicitly problematized, institutions will continue to implicitly reproduce the culture of the elite, and working-class voices will remain marginalized and silent.